Midwinter Madness.

A month or twain to live on honeycomb

Is pleasant — but to eat it for a year

Is simply beastly. Thus the poet spake,

Feeling how sticky all his stomach was

With hivings of ten thousand cheated bees.

O wisdom that could shape immortal words

And frame a diet for dyspeptic man!

But what of turnips? Come, a lyric now

Upon the luscious roots unsung as yet,

( Not roots I know but stalks; still, never mind,

Metre and sauce will suit them just as well )

Or shall we speak of omelettes? Muse, begin!

To feed a fortnight on transmuted eggs

Would doubtless be both comforting and cheap

But oh, the nausea on the fourteenth day!

I'd rather read a book by Ezra Pound

Then choke the seven hundredth omelette down,

Just as I'd rather read some F. S. Flint

Than live a month or twain on honeycomb.

O Ezra Pound! O omelette of the world!

Concocted with strange herbs from dead Provence,

Garlic from Italy and spice from Greece,

Having suffered a rare Pound-change on the way,

How rarely shouldst thou taste, were not the eggs

Laid in America and hither brought

Too late. I do n't like omelettes made with fowls.

Take hence this Pound and put him to the test,

Try him with acid, see if he turn black

As will the best old silver, when enraged

At touching fungi of the baser sort.

( Forgive digression. These similitudes

Entrance me and I lose myself in them,

As schoolboys, picking flowers by the way,

Escape the angry usher's vigilance

And then, concealed behind a hedge or shed,

Produce the awesome pipe or thrice-lit fag

And make themselves incredibly unwell. )

My brain is bubbling and the thoughts will out,

But, Ezra Pound! they turn again to thee,

As surely as the lode-stone to the Pole

Or as the dog to what he hath cast up

( A simile of Solomon's, not mine )

And your shock head of damp, unwholesome hay,

Such as, the cunning farmer oft declares,

When stacked, will perish by spontaneous fire,

Frequents my dreams and makes them ludicrous.

Thou most ridiculous sprite! Thou ponderous fairy!

Bourgeois Bohemian! Innocent Verlaine!

I read in The Booksellers’ Circular

That, in the University of Pa.

( Or Kans. or Col. or Mass, or Tex. or Ont.

— A line of normal pattern, Saintsbury )

You hold a fellowship in ( O merciful gods! )

Romanics, which strange word interpreted

Means, I suppose, the Romance languages.

Doubtless they read Italian in Pa.

And some may speak French fluently in Ont.

But German, Ezra! There's the bloody rub,

It's not Romance and it is hard to learn

And Heine, though an easy-going chap,

Would doubtless trounce you soundly if he knew

The sorry hash that you have made of him.

But no! you're not for immortality,

Not even such as that of Freiligrath,

Enshrined, together with his Mohrenfurst,

In unrelenting amber. I hold you here,

In a soap-bubble's iridescent walls,

The whimsy of a long midwinter night,

And give you immortality enough.

Thou sorry brat! Thou transatlantic clown!

That seek'st to ape the treadless Ariel

And out-top Shelley in an aeroplane,

Take the all-obvious padding from your pants

And cut your hair and go to Pa. again

( Or Kans. or Col. or Mass, or Tex. or Ont.

Or even Oomp. if such a place exist )

And take with you the poets you admire,

Both Yeats and Flint to charm the folk of Oomp.

And write again for Munsey's Magazine

Of your good brother Everyone. ( Just God!

Am even I of his relationship? )

So end as you began or even worse:

No matter, so‘ tis in America.